Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12. Jim Burke
honour.” (Antigone)
Anton and his partner wrote each line on a sticky note and put it on the board in the room along with those from the rest of the class. The teacher then gave each student five minutes to read each group of sticky notes silently and, individually, come up with a statement that summarized the lines. When the students returned to their seats, he called on volunteers to share their statements and, as a class, the students came up with a claim and counterclaim:
Claim: Because laws represent the collective wisdom of a society, no one individual has the right to violate those laws.
Counterclaim: Because the majority group in a society can overlook the rights of minorities or can be misled by a powerful view, individuals have the right to violate laws that are clearly unjust.
Step Three: Individual Writing
In preparation for writing a full essay in answer to the prompt above, Anton’s teacher asked each student to write a single paragraph in class. Students were allowed to use their notes from the discussion and to refer to the sticky notes on the board in order to express their initial thoughts.
Anton’s teacher was clear about the expectations for the assignment. Following the mental moves for argument, students were expected to both take a stand (make a claim) and recognize alternate points of view (counterclaim). The teacher also emphasized the importance of evidence in establishing these claims.
Here is Anton’s first draft, written in class:
Student Example 2: Class Discussion
In John Reynolds’s eighth grade Global Studies class, there’s no simple multiple choice exam at the end of the semester. Instead, each student is expected to research the position of a nation involved in the tension between North Korea and the rest of the world. Students write individual “white papers” summarizing the position of the countries they’re assigned and then work in teams of three to prepare arguments for a solution to the conflict that draws on factual information and represents the actual positions of the countries they represent. On the day of the exam, the students gather around a large table and conduct six-party talks while Mr. Reynolds plays the role of facilitator and takes notes on each student’s contributions.
Because this is an exam, Mr. Reynolds needs to assess each student. The final grade includes several components, each of which has its own rubric: a score for the white paper, a score for contributions to the discussion, an individual self-assessment, and a reflection written by each student that discusses the effectiveness of his or her contributions.
Here is the reflection written by Sam, who took on the role of South Korea. While Sam never uses the words claim or counterclaim in this reflection, those ideas are clearly present:
In order to positively contribute to the group, I knew that I had to have a goal and understanding of what South Korea, my assigned country, would desire. The first day of deliberation, I brought forth several points, but specifically a main issue in North Korea that their population is starving. The response to my point was surprising; argumentative debate and disorder broke out. I realize now that the tone and accusation I made came out incorrectly; I was intending on bringing up a way to show that North Korea needs other countries’ help. The following day, I made sure to react to comments with a calmer and less aggressive manner, and I used my notes to prepare to respond to other views to reach a compromise. I proposed that North Korea should rejoin the six-party talks and start to denuclearize their weapons, and as more trust is gained, South Korea would take action in removing the United States troops from their border. While discussing in small groups on the first day, I found out that each country had different objectives and main concerns, which made forming a solution harder, but after talking and presenting evidence, overall, all of the countries contributed to making a final, peaceful compromise.
By allowing his students to work together and discover the consequences of argument, evidence, and counterclaims in action, Mr. Reynolds creates a sense of relevancy and practicality. He also gives students a valuable discussion experience with enough structure to ensure learning.
“When the girls do a project with several assessment pieces, as Sam did in her reflection,” John told us, “they deconstruct their learning, and this, to me as a teacher, is the essence of creating and nurturing exemplary students. The written piece of argument as content is important, but the self-assessments, reflections, and peer evaluations demonstrate how students learn where their arguments succeeded, failed, and could be improved.”
Works Cited
Ferlazzo, L., & Hull-Sypnieski, K. (2014, April). Teaching argument writing to ELLs. Educational Leadership, 71(7). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr14/vol71/num07/Teaching-Argument-Writing-to-ELLs.aspx
Orwell, G. (2013). 1984. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Scaffolding Argument With Webb’s DOK
How Argument Works in Jim’s Classroom
The following examples come from a recent unit Jim taught on Orwell’s 1984.
Level One (Recall)
Sample Task: Define ironic (1) as it appears in the dictionary and (2) as you understand it in your own words.
What Jim’s Students Did: Looked online for simple definitions and then composed their own, setting Jim’s students up to think more deeply about uses of irony in the novel.
Level Two (Skills)
Sample Task: Explain how Orwell’s (2013) use of the word victory (e.g., Victory Mansions, Victory Gin) is ironic, supporting your answer with details or examples from the text.
What Jim’s Students Did: Applied this key literary term and their knowledge of how to analyze and find evidence to this novel.
Level Three (Strategic Thinking)
Sample Task: A conditioned response is defined as the learned response to a previously neutral stimulus. For example, let’s suppose that the smell of food is an unconditioned stimulus, a feeling of hunger in response to the smell is an unconditioned response, and the sound of a whistle is the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned response would cause you to feel hungry when you heard the sound of the whistle.Respond to the claim that everyone’s behavior during the Two Minutes Hate (2013, pp. 11–17) is a conditioned response. In your response, you should agree, disagree, or do both (agree and disagree). Explain your reasoning, supporting your explanation with examples from the text.
What Jim’s Students Did: Drew together a number of skills—analysis, organization, and support, for instance—to produce a synthesized piece that made a clear argument.
Level Four (Extended Thinking)
Sample Task: Think back to the lessons from your history class earlier this year concerning behavior during the 1950s and the McCarthy era. What do you think Orwell would have said about the reactions of US citizens to the House Un-American Activities Committee trials? Using evidence from your notes or research, argue that Orwell would or would not have characterized these reactions as conditioned responses.
What Jim’s Students Did: Linked their current study to another discipline and unit, prompting thinking that required making connections